ASA 127th Meeting M.I.T. 1994 June 6-10

2pSP10. Voice variability effects on phonetic processing.

C. A. Wannemacher

Dept. of Psychol., State Univ. of New York at Buffalo, Park Hall, Buffalo,
NY 14260

A growing body of research has begun to explore the relationship between
the processing of phonetic information and that of talker voice information. To
this end, the present work employed a series of experiments designed to further
investigate potential phoneme and voice integrality in the acoustic-phonetic
coding process. In a preliminary experiment, listeners rated the similarity of
pairs of tokens from several female talkers. Stimuli chosen from this corpus
were used in subsequent selective attention experiments to assess interference
in phonetic processing under conditions of high and low vocal similarity.
Phonetic classifications were made for isolated vowels, nonword CVs, and word
CVs. As a further constraint of voice variability, multiple tokens from a
single talker were also used in a selective attention task. The results will be
discussed with respect to the nature and degree of voice-phonme integrality as
a function of vocal variability, as well as to issues of talker normalization
in speech perception. [Work supported by NIDCD Grant No. DC-000219 to SUNY at
Buffalo.]